Enterprise Operations require operating systems, products, and software applications to be automatically built. It is critical for all the systems in the enterprise to be at the same operating system level and for each individual configuration type to be at the same product code level for proper functionality.
Pristine installation, a part of the wide enterprise deployment process, is a well-known process in which system administrators add, in an unattended installation mode, new servers and new workstations to the network that do not have an operating system or software installed on them.
Unattended or pristine installation is key to reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) factor. As managing systems becomes increasingly complex, pristine installation deployment methods become key to businesses or enterprises that try to minimize disruptions of Information Technology (IT) services. Other organizations must cope with the pressure of Service Level Agreements (SLA) which impose specific conditions and penalties for operation disruptions. For these organizations the time of resolution of incidents must be dramatically reduced.
Today, by using response files on small Local Area Networks, technicians are able to run unattended installation setups from individual computers. On these installations, response files provide the options required to install the operating system, which otherwise would need to be entered manually. Control of the installation is carried out by the technician who launches the process. But IT requirements of users are changing in today's marketplace at a very fast pace. These changes drive the continuous innovations and efforts that are being put into the development of tools better able to meet new business requirements.
So far, different systems and methods to load operating systems that are platform dependent have been applied to the attended or unattended installation of servers and workstations. In the marketplace, products like those from Installshield Corp., Wise Corp., Tivoli Systems Inc Corp., IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are the most widely used to install commercially available operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows NT, OS/2 from International Business Machines Corporation, Microsoft's Windows 95, as well as UNIX or AIX operating systems. While providing efficient methods to perform unattended installation, these products either provide installation for only some operating systems, or fail to provide central control of the process or command line exits that enable the generation of the unattended installation parameters.
Thus, a common drawback of existing systems is that they do not provide for an interface between the unattended installation of the operating system and the desired configuration of the machine to be built. The result is that the end user must be sufficiently skilled to be able to perform the unattended installation himself. Additionally, each time a new machine is to be built, all the parameters must be re-entered.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,202,206 to Dean et al., provides a method for installing programs, settings and configurations in a network of a plurality of server and client computers. The method involves the steps of preloading all the programs to be installed into a primary server and running a sequence of keystrokes and cursor entries to install the selected components and programs. This solution requires that the user be sufficiently skilled to select the components and programs to be installed.
However, all known attempts to solve these problems lack a user interface that provides a system for monitoring and controlling the software being loaded, and checks which products were successfully installed and configured.
Moreover, nothing presently known provides a command line and a central configuration database that allows a deployment team to automate and control the installation and configuration to of additional products once the operating system has been properly loaded.
Finally, nothing presently known provides a profiling mechanism that minimizes the user input needed to properly load the operating system.
Therefore, there is a need for a new system and a method to perform the unattended installation of servers or workstations based on a set of profiles. There is also a need for a new method of deployment that keeps track of the whole life cycle of the servers or workstations, isolating the end users from the intricacies of product installation and configuration.